HPCwire: The Week in Review

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February 16, 2007

The Week in Review

by John E. West, Director, ERDC Major Shared Resource Center

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Here's a collection of highlights, selected totally subjectively, from this week's HPC news stream as reported at insideHPC.com and HPCwire.

>>Schroedinger's Computer

The quantum was much in the news this week as Canadian tech start up D-Wave Systems unveiled Orion, a 16-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor. The commercial version of this early prototype system will ultimately be targeted at solving NP-hard problems that conventional digital computers have a hard time with.

There are lots of questions about the technology, however. First are the fundamental questions raised by some experts on whether there is enough evidence to prove that the calculations taking place are actually quantum, and not just an exotic analog calculation happening at 4 millikelvin. Then there are questions about whether the technology will scale by the 1,000 times or more needed to address problems too hard for computers to solve today.

Still, most everyone does agree that this is an important step in a very interesting direction, and to their credit D-Wave is very open about both the questions and the promise of their technology. If you'd like to do your own digging I recommend Scientific American's online coverage as a good place to start, along with this article by Ashlee Vance at The Register.

>>The International Solid State Circuits Conference

A lot of the goings on in IT reported this week came out in association with presentations made at the ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference) in San Francisco. The major chip companies were all showcasing their technology futures.

Intel gave us more details on their 1 TFLOPS 80-core experimental chip. Yes the chip only has a 32-bit address space, and yes it has dramatically simplified circuitry (about 1/3 the number of transistors on conventional chips from Intel). But Intel's advance is important in that it's spurring a whole new conversation about what operating systems and software might look like if they didn't have to spend so many millions of lines of code managing what used to be a scarce resource: the compute core.

AMD's discussions on its Barcelona quad-core offering focused on its own claims that it performs 40 percent better than Intel's quad-core line, and on its innovations in power and thermal management. Among other features Barcelona chips power down memory logic when not in use, and employ clock gating to shut down areas of the chip not in use.

IBM was talking about Power6, where their approach is to improve performance by cranking up the clock to nearly 5 GHz. This is clearly a contrarian approach by IBM. I understand that the move to hafnium-juiced chips will have stave off the fundamental physics problems that IBM is going to encounter on this path, but this approach appears to have a much shorter lifespan than the approach IBM's chip competitors are taking, and I wonder whether this isn't simply buying time while the company adjusts its path forward.

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